LAUSR

Medical image fusion technology can integrate complementary information from different modality medical images to provide a more complete and accurate description of the specific diagnosed object, which is very helpful for image-guided clinical diagnosis and treatment. This paper proposes an effective brain image fusion framework based on improved rolling guidance filter (IRGF). Firstly, input images are decomposed into base layers and detail layers using the IRGF and Wiener filter. Secondly, the visual saliency maps of the input image are computed by pixel-level saliency value, and the weight maps of detail layers are constructed by max-absolute strategy and are further smoothed with Gaussian filter, the purpose of which is to make the fused image appear more naturally and more suitable for human visual perception. Lastly, base layers are fused by visual saliency map based fusion rule and the corresponding weight maps from detail layers are fused by the weighted least squares optimization scheme. Experimental results testify that our method is superior to some state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective assessments.